Slashdot Mirror
Salon, Nearly No Money and Ultramercials
Adam9 writes "As Salon fights for survival, they have introduced a new advertising program that allows you to receive a free 12 hour pass by clicking through about 10 seconds of advertisements. Currently, the advertisements are from Mercedes-Benz. According to the article, they've lost about $79.7 million from their start in 1995. They also have about 45,000 subscribers right now." Jamie also pointed out this article from the WSJ, as well as the words from Salon themselves about it.
how many subscribers there are to slashdot?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
If they're getting paid per click, then generally advertisers don't pay for forced clicks, ie: I'm clicking this because I have to, not because I'm genuinely interested in their product. At least in the adult industry, this is a *big* no-no unless you accept a *much* smaller pay rate (generally called 'blind' clicks). I don't know how it'll fly with their advertisers.
Tasteful banner ads for online porn! Afterall, it's still the online money making king.
If Salon has decided to take this route, why not allow micropayments? I don't have a subscription to Salon, because I don't read it very often. But I do sometimes find 'premium' stories I'd like to read...Just not enough to get a subscription. If I could pay 25 cents or whatever to read the story, I gladly would.
I realize there are problems with accepting micropayments via credit card, but certainly something like PayPal could be used.
- James
It's an interesting idea, a "temporary subscription" in return for viewing some advertising. It seems there's something for everyone. The advertiser gets a forum where people actually have to click through the ad; Salon gets some money from the advertiser; and non-subscribers get access to "premium" content. If this works (and Salon stays in business in part because of this), perhaps other content sites will follow suit.
-Brendan
You forgot about the rational, successful, zitless, oversexed posters who time and time again try and post something like the following with a straight face:
.. mostly as evidenced by you posting to same site I'm posting to. I have you all figured out. Now I need coffee."
"You are all geeks. I am the lone non-geek who has a real handle on life in a way none of you ever possibly could
"Old man yells at systemd"
It's too bad to see Salon go -- they have genuinely interesting features on occassion. That said, I don't see how they ever really planned on surviving once the dot-com meltdown occurred. Selling the ability to opt-out of annoying ads just didn't cut it, especially given their level of overhead (big-name writers and the like). If Suck couldn't keep its head above water, Salon was always doomed. Still, it'll suck to have the only real webzine be Slate.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
BTW, Salon.com ranks No 714 on Alexa.com, which means that they serve more than 2-3 million pages per day. That should make them around $50,000 per month from ads. More than enough to pay a small team of journalists.
Now they have a solid base of advertisers and 45,000 paying subscribers, which is really good for an online magazine. The WSJ article says they are looking at a strategy of reducing costs. Sounds like a plan to me. Is it really conceivable that they can't find a way to keep costs within expected revenues?
- Start up
- Get lots of subscribers
- Sell out or IPO
Like in poker, they held a bad hand too long, and now they're dead. Big deal.Salon must be incredibly expensive to run. They employ full time journos and lots of support staff and techies. If a place like Kuro5hin.org (literally a one man show) barely hangs on through fundraisers and pledge drives then Salon with their scores of employees and meager advertising income are going down the tubes quickly.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
.. if for no other reason than to see the Spock pr0n.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
That'd be interesting -- set up contracts so the writers get paid based on how many people read their pages or, better yet, click on ads in their articles.
I could see a whole new writing paradigm evolving, one where you have Suck-style links to products you mention in your article and other tomfoolery to try and get people to go spend money.
Of course, it's way too late for Salon to adopt this approach -- the only time they'll be bringing in money is when they auction off their office equipment.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
what you're missing is that it takes money to run a magazine... *real* journalists, *real* reporters, etc.
it took USA Today 5 YEARS to become profitable, and it was still only because they were bought out by a huge megamedia company.
I was a paying member of Salon for a year. The main way I read Salon was through my PDA using Avantgo. Salon's method for prompting users to get premium subscriptions was by giving a 1 page teaser of a premium article, then saying they should become paying members to read the rest.
Their avantgo channel, however, had no method in place for Premium subscribers to get full stories on their PDAs! For a year, the premium stories would have their little teaser, then at the bottom there would be a little apology to the effect of 'Sorry, we haven't made a channel for our premium subscribers yet, but we will soon!'
Empty promises.
They never made the channel, and since my primary interface to Salon was via PDA, I wasn't getting what I had paid for (premium access).
Their business decision to indefinately postpone the premium channels have probably cost them quite a handful of customers, which is unfortunate.
According to the article, they've lost about $79.7 million from their start in 1995.
During which time VA Software lost $725 million.
Man, that sounds scary. Like something from Brazil or Blade Runner. Might make your head explode if you watch for thirty seconds or more. I guess that's why Salon limited it to 10 seconds. Too much liability.
but then I started to really pay attention to the content and actively mine the past articles. they have some really good and thought-provoking stuff. it really is unlike a lot of the more traditional news sources like new york times and washington post. there are articles on the left and right equally. as an independent, I found it refreshing enough to subscribe. and now I spend a lot more time reading material that I don't seem to find anywhere else.
I think there are many reasons Salon is failing: too much overhead, lack of a print version, content too stagnant for the medium(NET). But the real nail in the coffin is their far-left reporting/editorial. The Fray is great, but if you are going to post a bunch of baseless rhetoric to get readers fired up you had better have a convenient method for opposing views to reply. Otherwise you wind up with former readers like me, who don't like to be beaten-up with our arms tied behind our backs. Disagreeing with many of the articles drove me to read the site, but in the end it also drove me away. Slate is a similar site, but the forum is much more accessible and tied to the content and the authors/guest writers and columnists seem to actually read the forum posts.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I used this little feature about two weeks ago. I wanted to read the rest of one their "premium" articles that I really wanted to see the conclusion of. I just happened to actually read one of the ad's that claimed that I could get a free pass to read this article if only I would look at this $60,000 BMW or something. I agreed. After about 10 seconds an ad with about 10 frames generated. By the time I got to the third or fourth frame, I noticed that I didn't have to click through all of the images. In the lower corner, in very fine print, was a "skip to article" button or something. It worked.
I don't have a special insight into the on-line publcation industry, but it seems to me that there are a lot of Toms, Dicks, and Harrys blogging lately. Maybe these are ex-Salon writers, but blogs allow for an interaction between soapbox ranter and listener. Even with a 'Letter to the Editor' space, a publication is still one sided. "Here's my point of view - suck on it!". And, as we all know (as is the case with blogs and OS's), you just can't compete against something that's free...
From reading comments in here, I get the feeling that Salon's material is below par. It should come as no surprise that Salon is dead, but I'm amazed that they have lost as much money as they have. I wonder what they pay (paid) their writers?
I'd like to state that I worked for a company that had over 180,000 "subscribers" before it folded in 2001. We didn't charge for a subscription, but we did charge for content. Each piece of content you viewed was a small fee. Quite frankly, I was never convinced of this business worthiness of this approach. We burnt through about 30 million before going belly up. Looks like Salon will be doing the same thing.
I think online communities are going to have a hard time selling to individuals. While the metaphore works for real world newspapers and magazines, their publishing numbers are going down. Less people are reading them because they can get free content on the web. Now, I totally believe you should pay for content, but it should be subscription based and not be on a per site basis. In a sense, it should work like AOL (I know, I know). With AOL, you get prepackaged content. I'm suggesting you pay xx.xx dollars and get a pass to 20 or 30 web sites that all use the same password. You should be able to sign up for these sites through different subscribers, like you would your domain registration or cable access. The web sites still get the same amount of money, but if one 'net-network can provide a lower price but sell to more people, they can compete. They could also provide different site packages or offer more sites.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
You ran for 5 or 6 years by giving away 100% of your content and lost an assload of money :( . Then you started only giving away 80% and lost less money :) . But you have still lost 80 million dollars :(
:( . And maybe you'll actually turn your business around, if that is still even a remote possibility :()
Right now, you should immediately switch and give away only 20% or less of your content and charge for the rest. Maybe you will still go out of business, but if you don't do this you are guaranteed to, running crazy ad deals for mercedes is not even close to a long term solution
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
Who really thought that giving ... facials over the internet was a good idea?
I don't know about the rest of you, but I would think any company that could figure out how to give facials over the Internet would make a ton of money. I'd like to see a copy of THAT business plan !
A BIIIIG problem w/ Salon is that the Premium (fee) content categories change from day to day. Everyday the list of columnists that are "Premium" change and what you could read for free yesterday.
My favs are the cartoons (Carol Lay is a God(dess))
Carry Tennis
Andrew Sullivan.
Anyone remember those old warez sites, (and some H/P/A sites as well) where they tried to force you to click their sponsors, or links to top-sites in order to access them?
I guess all kinds of marketing comes around. But the real question is, are people too cheap to pay for salon premium really going to buy Mercedes-Benzs?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...and there is no way I'd ever pay for any subscription to anything (even in print) ever again.
The freeness of information on the net has forever tainted my opinion on things worth subscribing to, as it as done to many others. Eventually, this will lead to a ton of small sites that exist based on the owners love of whatever that site is about. The quality won't be the same, but I'll be damned if I'm paying a penny for any of that anymore.
sig.
It's gotten so bad for Salon they've started giving away their content management system!
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
600K a year would not come close to covering the cost of the high-profile and high-quality writers and editors they have on board. Then don't forget their production staff, sales staff, marketing staff, tech people, legal counsel, bandwidth costs, associated overhead, etc., etc.,
... as far as these things go. Considering that their losses are down to under $6 million/ year (per their last quarterly SEC filing), and that their income is up $0.5 million from a year ago while they've cut non-content-related (i.e. marketing and administrative) expenses by the same about, they could be viable in a few more years.
It would take less than 200,000 new subscribers at the $30 rate for them to break even, less than 7% of the 2.7 million unique visitors they cite for December 2000.
The main problem, of course, is time.
Salon has been around since the beginning of the internet boom & have a loyal reader base. Unfortuntely, most of their readers are used to getting their info for free & at this point it's going to be an uphill battle to convince folks to cough up for what they've been using all along. Will they be able to do so before they have to declare bankruptcy? Let's hope not.
Damn, post a story about how Salon is losing money and then link them in the story? That's like telling your doctor that you have a headache and then they kick you in the nuts.
The web sites still get the same amount of money, but if one 'net-network can provide a lower price but sell to more people, they can compete.
The content providers have no incentive to employ a middleman for selling subscription packages in this scenario. Not when there's more money to be made by setting the price and selling access themselves.
It would only increase technical complexity too.
Wake, work, pick up the kids, watch Friends, chat on AOL, sleep - repeat. Not much time left in that equation to develop a curiousity about politics (or the world in general, outside of your hometown and what you see on CNN).
How do those of use who will probably never use up the $25 keep from getting screwed? If I go to a site once it doesn't mean I'll keep coming. I'm effectively making $25 deposits on all these sites I may or may not ever use again. I hope they give refunds when I close the account.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
It's a shame, because Salon is one of the best news sites ever in America. Salon's editorials and other pieces are just great pieces of journalism, from politics to sex. It's a bit like Wired was in it's best days. I can't think of any similar, independent site with attitude. I keep my fingers crossed for them.
Even random is random. My nick, too.
I'm kidding, I do agree Salon is liberal-oriented but have no problem with it given my politics. I'm pretty moderate and don't read Mother Jones or the National Review. Most magazines on/offline are politically oriented one way or another, most to far greater extremes. Perhaps out of concern for "balance" Salon has recently brought on Andrew Sullivan. I wish they'd found a better writer, but oh well.
/. is not immune.
The remarkable thing about Salon is that it has actually broken a number of stories over the last half-dozen years. There are frequent examples of excellent writing (not all of it). Many people of influence keep track of what the journal is saying. That's quite an accomplishment, and a good deal more expensive to achieve than your average on-line reader-driven news clipping service (ahem).
I would not encourage them to try to be all things to all people, if such a thing were possible. Certainly there could be editorial improvements, but nothing would turn Salon into a fount of wealth. The fundamental problem is the as-yet unestablished business model for this kind of thing. Others are watching Salon cast about for the answer -- the magazine is even polling its readers' opinions -- to learn from their success or failure.
I finally did subscribe to Salon relatively recently -- I *hope* they don't go bankrupt! If they do, it will foretell decreased access to the online versions of traditional press, the failure of other online forums, and pressure on the rest to somehow raise profitability by increasing annoying advertising or other schemes. Despite it's far lower overhead,
Ask not for whom the bell tolls....
It has been noted that Salon's financial woes (how the hell did they rack up 80M in debt?) stems from them hiring good writers. Excellent writers, in fact, top-of-the-line. Noam Chomsky comes to mind. But I have to point out that Alternet.org has writing that is, IMO, and just a smidge to the left of Salon.
So I have to ask, was the 80M in debt really necessary? Personally, I like Salon, and it is one of only three news sites in my bookmarks (along with the BBC and the aforementioned Alternet.org), and I am a subscriber to their premium service. But the idea that writers won't write unless they're paid is a lot like the RIAA saying people won't make songs if they can't !@#$ you in the butt for $16.99/cd. Just doesn't make any sense. But it sure seems to make sense to Salon:
"The greatest weakness of Internet users -- all of us -- is our failure to recognize the value of intellectual property. Of course we love free access to information -- the more the better. For years, those of us who are information junkies have been like pigs in mud. It has been fun, but those something-for- nothing days are over. There is a difference between the Internet mantra that "information loves to be free" and free information."
There is a large talent pool in the world, Salon. Use it. Big names are nice but big names are why you won't exist in a few years. The notion that talented writers only write if you lob a lot of money at them is just as false for the written word as it is for music.
My
Limekiller
I subscribed to Yahoo internet life last year -- dead after 3 issues
I subscribed to Salon last month (admittedly I knew they've been in hot water more or less the last few years) and now this
I oughtta start charging these companies for my not subscribing to them...
$80 million.
$80, 000, 000 !
1. I could see $1e6/yr for staff (ok, so they're probably terribly overstaffed!)
2. Toss in another $1,000,000/yr for facilites.
3. x (what, like, ) 7 years.
4. = $66 million PROFIT!
If these guys actually burned through $80, 000, 000 , they're doing something wrong! (of course there was a lot of that going around in the 90's!)
I don't even know what I'm doing, and I'm confident I could put together the equivalent for much less than that. The only difficulty would be getting the "A list" talent, and I'm not so sure that what they have is really that special.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
There are rumors that Terra-Lycos (TRLY) is talking with Salon management to buy Salon. Well, it is only a rumor, but feaseable when Terra-Lycos has more cash than any other portal/dot.com o whatever.
Huh. Just had some friends laid off from Lycos.
They got Lycos *and* got lost.
I just wish there were, like, really rich people who were willing to fund interesting stuff like word.com or suck.com, kind of like that heiress lady giving $100million to a Poetry magazine.
I mean, guess if they had always thought that way they wouldn't have their bajillions, but now that they do, it would be cool if they could fund worthy online ventures.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
No, I understand that, but never making money tends to bode poorly for the future of any business. I'm projecting out into the not-so-distant future.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I am really curious that who are your journalist heroes, standing brave and smart in the spotlight, knowing everything about world politics.
Would you name them please?
Even random is random. My nick, too.
Kuro5hin.org and SlashDot are successful if you look in terms of small-business successful. But not compared to Time and People magazine. Drudgereport is another example of a "success". It seems the key to success in this new medium is to keep overhead to a minimum and provide content that isn't availabile elsewhere.
In other words, targeting specific consumers. Salon is out there covering much of the same material with the same slant as the mainstream media. Sure they do some innovative stuff and take a little more risk, but really not that often.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Try http://www.alternet.org or http://www.bbc.co.uk or http://www.michealmoore.com
Everybody have a look at http://www.mercedesproblems.com/ before you even think of buying one of these clunkers.
I'm giving Volvo a try now.
Why didn't you just grab the "print" version of Salon, which was just the article texts, every day? I've done pods development in AvantGo 3.x and 4.x, and its a serious piece of junk.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Yes, we used Qpass, and they are either out of business or are on their way out. I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about a reputable company offering subscriptions to CNN, WSJ, Slashdot, etc... In response to the other fellow who suggested sites wouldn't do this, I could not disagree more.
It costs much more for a company to maintain their own billing and subscription process than it does to receive a check every month from a middleman. The middleman is involved because he can give the user a REASON to buy the content. I'm not going to pay $19.95 a year per online magazine. I am going to pay that for 4,5, or maybe even 10 sites. Also, the individual sites do not have market themselves nearly as much because they will be getting advertisement though the middlemen.
If done right, it will work. We aren't talking about a no-name startup selling no-name content to uninterested people. This will likely be an initiative by a large corporation with an establed brand or reputation.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Personally I think the web is going to kill the news media as we know it today i think this is a good thing. We complain as a society when special interest groups taint our polititians, but we never flinch when they taint our news outlets.
What it will boil down to is journalists will have to actually do something other than play on peoples emotions because the truth i.e. facts will be readily available on the net. The net will allow small time journaliistic talents to be heard on a large scale. As it is today the chances of becoming a notable and famous journalist is smaller than becoming the next Eminem.
I'm personally sick of seeing Ashleigh Banfield on CNN dressed up like an Arab reporting on issues she 1) has no real clue about and 2) probably couldn't give a shit about anyway.
Hasn't anyone been watching CNN? They report the same 2-3 stories all day, everyday. When they have been beaten to death they report them 500 more times until they are sure everyone in America has been brainwashed by it. Then they find 2-3 more stories that are exactly the same but have different faces.
The liberal media is just out of this world these days. Nothing but crying and complaining and pointing fingers at everything and everyone.
The answer is independant media run by people who do it in their spare time. Much like open source software where multiple influences and ideas are used. Right now you have nothing like that in the media, most of the news agencies are run by large corporations (MSNBC anyone?), or are influenced heavily by liberal democrats who care little about real issues.
It's time we took the media into our own hands. There is no reason you can't report what is happening locally on your own webpage. Isn't this largely what slashdot is? It's news contributed by multiple sources for the benefit of it's own contributors. You get back what you put in.
I'll end my rant there.
Quick and dirty definitions:
APIC = cumulative money the company received for issuing stock
Accumulated deficit = cumulative net losses of the company since inception (companies that have made money call this "retained earnings")
Friends and I have been complaining about GameSpot's reviews recently (see here) but they still cover a lot of video game news and provide a lot of reading that at least has some facts in it, and occasionally good opinions. As a content provider, their value to me is in older stuff. I like going back and reading old reviews of games that are now on the used games bargain rack. To get to that stuff, however, you have to have a subscription. That's what I think is the interesting idea in GameSpot's model: you can have everything (mostly) that we publish for free as long as you come often to the site and read it within a week or two of the publish date. To read older stuff, you have to pony up. Thus, people who just want free news suffer the banner ads and GameSpot makes money. The people who want more (myself included) will pony up and as a bonus not ever worry about banner ads or being locked out of something.
;^D) This is precisely the observation on which I think GameSpot is betting their farm: people who want an extensive library of content will pay for it, even if the content is dated somewhat.
During E3, their bandwidth was excellent. I got some huge movies during peak hours as fast as my netpipe could pull it. The reviews go back to the Saturn days, which fits my interests just fine. I do wish they had more GameBoy reviews and more detail in the older reviews in general.
Running a tiny little gaming site with a friend in my spare time, I can see why having a catalog of old content is valuable...I just have to look at the Google searches that lead people to my site. People stop in to see all kinds of stuff on my site, from months ago to yesterday. (Whether it's worth their visit, I have no idea.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
One other person has recommended grabbing the "print" versions of articles you're interested in, which should do the trick.
As an alternative, if you're a subscriber you can get the day's content as a single big text or PDF file - with the obvious exception of things updated during the day (and presumbly included in the next day's files). Easy to convert in any way you want.
fencepost
just a little off
I second that. There are a lot of people out there who'd write for Salon, Alternet, or anywhere for lots less than the going "slicks" rate, and even a lot less than the going "pulps" rate. Some of us are so desperate to see our names in print that we'll publish for copies...
...or post to Slashdot... :)
I never tried to submit anything to Salon because I was always sort of intimidated by the calibre and "names" of the people who get published there. Then again, I never got to submit to Playboy in the 1970s when it was the ne plus ultra of SF short story markets, either, so...
Interrobang,
Killing media venues since 1994
By getting Accepted for Publication
(hm, maybe I shoulda submitted to Salon after all)
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
I just went to salon and read a premium article. Here is my synopsis...
If a 10 second ad can keep salon and their reporters working I'm all for it. The US needs independent journalists. (Even if they sometimes say things you'd rather not hear. Personally I'm offended by something in Salon every single day. If I wasn't, I wouldn't bother to read it.)
Salon's problem is the same that liberal radio hosts (and to a similar extend liberal tv host - see Donhaue) faced.
They don't offer any compelling reason to watch or listen to them long term. Usually the methodlogy followed was to attack instead of offering alternatives. People aren't going to pay to see you whine about stuff, even if they tend to agree with it. The left just doesn't support outlets like Salon.
Salon did try to veer back to the center but they stayed left so long that they really could not convince people to look again.
So now what? We are to feel sorry for them because they have to resort to such tactics to stay in business? I look at these types as ads as the flares of a sinking ship.
Too bad its the Titanic and no one is around to rescue them
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
You mean that Donna "Now how many times can I mention that I'm an SM-loving lesbian incest survivor in this article purporting to be about someone else" Minkowitz might have to look elsewhere for work? We might not be treated to weekly updates from Tom "recycled clipart and crack-addled politics -- two great tastes that taste great together" Tomorrow? There will be one less place for Andrew "Power Glutes" Sullivan to toady up to the GOP? Joe Conason will have to go back to sucking Al Gore's dick in the New York Press rather than in a national forum?
What, exactly, is the downside here?
I'll miss Charles Taylor, King Kaufman and Keith Knight, but I doubt they'll have much trouble finding work elsewhere. As for the rest of it, good riddance to bad rubbish. Maybe if Salon had stuck by its original intention of being an interactive Atlantic or Harpers for the web, instead of becoming a mouthpiece for the DNC cum get-rich-quick IPO scheme, it might not be in such dire straits today.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
My post did not show any favoratism for either liberal or traditional views - it merely exposed my opinion on why liberal media tends to fail. The post was, in itself, therefore liberal in nature. This said, the uneducated mod read my post, which caused some small spark to fire off in the subconcious of his tiny brain, and he quickly clicked on "Flamebait". I win by example. I am a prime time player. Troll mas fina baby.
The only way this makes sense is if that $725 million is internet monopoly money, and not good, honest U.S. greenbacks.
The internet monopoly money (VA stock certificates) came from real honest greebacks, though. $30/share back at the IPO price, and the $725 million VA lost doesn't even count the kickbacks to the brokers.
Where did it go? Haircuts, groceries, rent, and gaming machines for employees like Cowboyneal, in part. Then interest to the banks (and REITs) which own pretty much everything else.
Are Scientologists allowed to go into bookstores and leave without buying one of Elron's books (which can later be boxed up, sent back to HQ, and sold into a bookstore again)?
Still, I don't think that's a significant part of Coulter's sales. I'd credit a lot of those more to the Jerry Springer mentality than to anything else.
Finally the point: of the "successful news/opinion type sites" that are very conservative, how many of them are public and let you see their books? For the ones that are publically held, are there any where the numbers for the sites aren't buried with other items on an overall statement?
I'll use Fox as an example - how profitable is the Fox News web site separate from the rest of the company? Is it subsidized by profits from elsewhere? Is it shortcutting quality journalism because by the time it comes out that the story was wrong it'll be off the front page anyway?
fencepost
just a little off
I just followed google news to a story at TIME. Their article surrounded by a kalidescope of ads took more than 10 seconds to load over my DSL line. The article was presented in an uncomfortably skinny space left after the mass of garish ads were plastered around it.
I can't tell you what any of the TIME ads were for. The only impression I carry away is that the article didn't have as much meat as I expected than the web site is annoying.
I'll take a tasteful ultramercial once a day instead of a delay to load a mass of ads on every page.
Yeah, because indymedia.org, thenation.com, www.theregister.co.uk, www.politechbot.com, www.alternet.org are all just non-entities. Not to mention high-quality foreign journalism like the Guardian or the BBC.
I do not have a signature
Mainstream American media outlets are no more liberal than the megacorps that own them. Is AOL/Time-Warner or Disney caling for the workers to take over the means of production? I don't think so. And journalists are, on average, more conservative on economic issues than most Americans.
The myth of the "liberal media" is a successful marketing ploy of the right wing, matched only by their ability to convince average Americans that they are rich (in one poll, 19% of American voters surveyed believed that they fell into the top 1% income bracket) and thus should support their plutocratic policies.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Sheesh, you'd think they actually had to buy truckloads of dead trees and run printing presses for a living, or something.
My sympathy for Salon is pretty limited. Requiring me to sit through a Mercedes-Benz ad in order to read the Bush-bash du jour seems like a pretty broken business model.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
The math isn't hard, either. Start with 50K/mo. Hosting and bandwidth is probably $15K/mo. Office space and other expenses are maybe $15K/mo, although they may have committed to a budget-busting lease a few years before. If each person averages $5K/mo (60K/yr in salary+benefits, commission, or frelance) and there is $20K/mo left, they can pay for FOUR people.
Think I'm too high on hosting? OK, take it down $5K and you can add another person. Office space too expensive? Okay, knock $5K off there too and add another person. Now you have six people. Maybe you can convince people to work for $4K/mo on average, pay the freelancers less, or chop out benefits, that could get you to a staff of seven or eight.
Play with the numbers all you want, it's not fun because eventually you realize what all the big pubs know, in an content production organization your big expense is people costs. You reduce costs with layoffs or freelance cutbacks, which leads to less content and lower quality due to poor editing, which leads to disgruntled readers. Repeat until death spiral ends.
There are a lot of liberals here. Some have been brainwashed by the PC movement so severely they have to run over to CNN and do a search for they're copy and paste answers to everything.
The content providers have no incentive to employ a middleman for selling subscription packages in this scenario.
So why don't the authors market directly to us? Salon is already something of a middleman. The overhead of selling subscriptions is high enough that they don't want to be selling limited subscriptions for $5, but there may be a large market for buying limited subscriptions to a number of websites for $50, of which Salon might get a $5 cut. If you get more than six times as many subscribers that way as you would $30 subscribers by selling directly, it's a win.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
the average American...believes that his government can do no wrong, is misinformed about their individual rights, has had little exposure to liberal setiments, is not politically active, and is primed to have a knee jerk-reaction to whatever liberal opinions that they might hear....Not much time left in that equation to develop a curiousity about politics
...
...
My post did not show any favoratism for either liberal or traditional views
Now, I'm not supporting any political position...but it seems obvious to me that your first post very strongly makes the statement that those that are not liberal are such because they are misinformed, stupid, or don't care. Conversely, you are saying that if people were properly informed and paid attention to current events, then OBVIOUSLY they would have liberal ideas. By adding the phrase about "knee-jerk reaction to liberal ideas", you are clearly associating the previous statements with non-liberals.
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
Everybody is asking, "How could an online magazine lose so much money" and everybody else is giving vague answers. According to their financial reports they seem to have trimmed down considerably this year, but looking at last year they were spending about a million a month on content and production, half a million on sales and marketing, $100k on research and development (??? you tell me) and about $400k on admin. That's $24 million a year right there. Losing $11 million/year doesn't seem so far-fetched.
What interests me is that each of the two top execs made $300k last year. Not bad pay for shovelling venture capital down a hole, eh?
...not its dopey pro-rich-liberal bias or its coastline cliquishnes or its porn-driven, moronically desperate marketing schemes.
And they've gotten more average as they've asked for more money. You can turn on any cable news channel and see Andrew Sullivan and Arianna Huffington saying the same stupid things they say in their Salon columns. Greil Marcus writes for every magazine on earth. Tom Tomorrow and Lynda Barry are more widely syndicated than Seinfeld. Damien Cave's tech columns are no better than your average +4 Interesting
They've fired their best writers (Paglia, for example) to cut costs, and hired utterly average dead-tree columnists (why King Kaufman and Allen Barra instead of, say, Ralph Wiley?--what is this, 1982?), and just flat-out failed to bring in interesting new people who could liven things up (Jim Goad, Nick Gillespie and Justin Raimondo could probably use a few extra bucks from side jobs, for example).
Browse their archives from three to five years ago. The articles were mostly good. They were almost all interesting. Some were even surprising. But they waited until the site degenerated into PBS blandness (plus occasional class-baiting "I Was a Stripper for a Day" and "Trailer-Park Republicans: Whitey in the Wild" bilge and "classy" porn for prissy feminists and self-hating men) to start asking for money.
That--and simple mismanagement--is why they're broke. And they deserve it. "Lilies that fester..."
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
Amen. From Salon's article on their own troubles in the internet economy:
I still go back and read old suck.com articles when its a slow news day on
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
Thats the funniest thing I've read all day. Thanks, i'm sending it to all my friends right now so they can laugh too.
Oh and of course leave it to the liberal to start with the name calling, I mean it's not like you had an actual argument right?
When will it occur to Mercedes that anyone trying to save $12 a year in subscription costs probably isn't going out to buy a Mercedes?
The only way for us to become aware of such abuses is to have a strong alternative to the mainstream media. So I would urge all slashdotters, even those who are usually apathetic to political issues, to invest some time and energy in political awareness and support for independent journalism. Otherwise, someday you may find yourself at the wrong end of a law enforcement process gone out of control.
mhack
Building a better ribosome since 1997
Oh but Pelosi will turn it all around for them, LOL
That woman is as far left as it gets.
I think most of the opinion magazines operate on profit margins ranging from slim to negative and are at least partially reliant on the kindness of wealthy owners or public grants. National Review has William F. Buckley, The Weekly Standard is the pet project of the Kristol family, The American Prospect got bailed out by Bill Moyers a couple years back, Harper's has had a several near-death experience, Paul Newman and Robert Redford are co-owners of The Nation, and gazillionaire Mort Zuckermain bailed out The Atlantic Monthly from a severe deficit. Even the popular market is awfully tough -- just ask Oprah or Rosie, or the people who used to run Jane and Sassy.
All of the opinion mags above target roughly the same demographic as Salon (if not necessarily the same ideologies), and all have equivalent- or higher-quality writing, established reputations, and an existing subscriber base to draw from. The surprising thing is that anyone ever thought Salon's business model would surpass them.
As others mentioned, payments under $1 are completely unfeasible due to PayPal fees.
One solution is that instead of paying $0.25 each time, you pay $25 1% of the time, at random. This avoids the impossibility of small payments, and costs the customer just as much in the long run.
Sure, you can have a run of bad luck and pay a bit more for a while. If that really bothers you, don't join the scheme. For those who can handle that uncertainty, it is a feasible way to actually implement micropayments. And it's the only one I've heard of.
It seems to me that many of these responses to Salon's troubles miss the point, focusing almost exclusively on the magazine's perceived business failings. Whether or not they, or the .com downturn, or the nation's dwindling supply of patience for in-depth and serious-minded news coverage, are to blame for the magazine's dire straits, the fact remains that Salon maintains a standard of journalistic quality and integrity that will be sorely missed if they should go out of business.
As many of my worthy peers have pointed it, Salon does lean a little left, no doubt about it. But given our country's recent and violent list to starboard, and our Democratic leaders' apparent unwillingness or inability to act like a real opposition party, we need magazines like this more than ever.
The instances you mention are why I said "soft" right. In european political terms Salon is at best "centre-right". It's is most definatly not left wing - not by any wild stretch of the imagination.
A UK example will illustrate. The "soft right" of our conservative (right wing) party a week or two ago defied conservative party policy and voted for a bill to allow adoption of children by gay couples.
There's an old joke commonly trawled up when teaching US politics to British students. Runs something like this. "America has two main political parties. On one side there's the Republican party, which is roughly the equivalent of our Conservative party, and on the other side there's the Democratic party, which is roughly the equivalent of our... Conservative party"
Please
Use your power for good
I stole this Sig
Salon magazine is a great magazine, but it has never gotten the web. The greatest advantage of the web is that "the content is out there".
Rather than paying $100K to traditional writers to pen articles in HTML instead of a remington, they should have tapped into the plethora of expertise available in the web, at much lower rates.
A magazine that really understood how the web operates would
(1) have a lot more letters from the readers
(2) allow the best, most informed letters to become part of the article (kind of
(3) invite leads from the readership at large which would then be completed jointly with a journalism major
(4) Publish a large number of articles a day under this model, making it more likely that people would pay for a subscription
(5) ???
(6) profit
How about -
Indymedia
BBC
or for some partial journalism / general questioning and sometimes odd, but certainaly not bland corp media
Michael Moore
DisInfo
then there are specialist sites for different topics -
Cryptome
Statewatch
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Does anyone have anything intellegent to say about my little observation/theory? Other then to mod it a troll?
Ya know, Socrates was a troll. But sometimes, a troll *is* just a troll.
Amazing magic tricks
Terra Lycos & Tiscali too are always talking to everybody... talk is cheap however.
MP3 Search Engine
Communism is a poor example...on the other side you have Fascism, which almost everyone would agree is just as bad if not worse, with the same inability to say why.
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
which is why the word "Nazi" is a german acronymn for the "National Socialist Workers Party"
The "National Socialist" name was propagandistic, dumbass. The Nazis needed all the political leverage they could get in the twenties. Hitler figured people would be dumb enough to fall for this, and he was right. In fact people still fall for it even today.
It's like the "Recording Industry Artists of America". Don't believe everything you read.
I'm not completely sure that the site isn't a parody. But I have to give credit where credit is due. Those liberal geeks are definitely on the cutting edge of technology.
<title>STEVE KANGAS' LIBERAL FAQ</title>
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/2.01Gold (Win32)">
I've never been a subscriber to Salon, and I wouldn't say their content is all great, but one of the things that worries me most these days is the airtight corporate control over all our major (and minor for the most part) media. Salon at least does some independent investigative journalism and is not afraid to print stories from one of my favorite journalists, Greg Palast, including his exposé of the Florida election theft in 2000, and his "re-exposé" of the same thing still going on in this year's election there. Also, Joe Conason's Journal is a regular Salon political column that is almost always great. I can get stuff like this elsewhere, but, sadly not often from a place as "reputable" as Salon. If Salon disappears the pickings will be even slimmer and the Palasts and Conasons of the world will be even more marginalized.
Investigative reporting costs tons of money, and even if Salon has the best of intentions, the bottom line will prevent them from doing lots of stories. Maybe we can use the slashdot effect to really make a difference, and not only save them, but give them the funds to actually improve. Our corporate government and out-of-control military-industrial complex need to keep the people blissfully ignorant in order to continue getting away with murder every day. Ownership of the media is their biggest weapon in this war against us, and so I've decided I can afford to pay $18.50 (or $30 with no ads) to try and save a dying breed. Who's with me?
You haven't looked at rental costs in San Francisco, have you?
Best Slashdot Co
If you're going to flame somebody, get your own facts straight first. The first A in RIAA is "Association," not "Artists."
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Communism is extreme economic control by the government, which is a far-left concept...whereas Fascism is extreme personal/social control by the government, which is a far-right concept. I thought that point was clear...
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
Outside of talk radio, which is typically conservative and uses the term "Communism" to refer to those of the far left, Commumism really isn't mentioned in the national press outside of reference to Communist and post-Communist nations.
For example, Cuba and China are communist countries, and to a a degree proudly so... The last Fascist countries fell over 50 years ago (WWII axis nations)
But anyhow...your original premise is that liberalism is thought of as a 'bad thing' in America, and the fact that Communism is thought to be an evil thing supports that fact; I would actually say it's more likely that the average uneducated Joe doesn't like Communism with far-leftism but rather with "evil" countries like China, Cuba, and the former Soviet bloc.
Now, I've also heard the flip side...there are those that associate "conservative" and "Republican" with the whole right-wing religious wacko, ten commandments, creationist deal.
I've also heard countless times from either side of the political spectrum claims that the major news outlets have a political bent to the opposite direction. While no one would doubt that radio is dominated by right-wingers, the print media seems to lean in whatever direction the local politics swing. For example, the Boston Globe or the Sacramento Bee most likely have a left-wing bent, whereas the Dallas Star-Telegram I would assume to have a right-wing bias.
As far as the televised national media, well, I've heard the arguments from both sides, but I just don't see it. The national outlets spend so much time reporting on the actual news that there's little opportunity for bias...more news, less discussion of the news. I also suspect that if a national outlet began to develop a bias to one side, people would immediately begin to disregard it as such.
So...I have to say that I'm of the opinion that there's no real swing in either direction over the term "liberal" or "conservative"...look at elections...each side accuses the other of being too liberal or too conservative as if the label is an insult...I think it's more true that the labels leave bad tastes in the mouths of those too far to the other side of the political spectrum.
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."